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whether they learn that suffering rather than pleasure is the source of
human vitality.) One may guess at the affinity between this position and
an esteem for the power of imaginative expression; for the task of
qualifying by doubt the most enlightened and reasonable projects of
society is not easily within the province of enlightenment and reason.
That the aims of this attitude are not frivolous, that the power of
fantasy to move us beyond reason need not culminate in an empty ges–
ture-these are provided by the practical issue of Freudian, not Jungian,
therapy. Freud's psychological speculations run in the direct line of vi–
sionary dissent from the first. The idea of an unconscious, of thought–
processes that occur beneath the level of self-awareness, was not novel to
Freud, whose unique contribution lay rather in the recognition that this
function is complicated by an irreconcilable conflict between the native
propensities of the psyche and the requirements of civilization. The
Freudian unconscious consists largely of
repressed contents,
of material
that culture will allow only indirect expression, whose continual striving
for immediate release is an indication of the profound discontinuity be–
tween nature and society. Throughout his career, Freud never ceased to
lay emphasis upon his conviction that the same deflections of energy
responsible for the great achievements of culture are responsible as well
for the disturbances of the neurotic, that the mentally
ill
have succumbed
to a conflict from which we all suffer. When we speak of Freud, we
must remark upon the notorious ambiguity of his sentiments concerning
the mechanisms of sublimation, of the conversion of organic into social
energies. For, on the one hand, the biological processes from which our
social energies derive are, according to Freud, indifferent to spiritual
demands; on the other, the appropriation of these processes to any
spiritual task presupposes repression and makes enjoyment of the social
product difficult if not impossible. Nothing is more marked in Freud
than his commitment to science and to those civilized values of discipline
and order upon which the scientific enterprise rests; at the same time we
must trace a growing suspicion on his part that these values may be self–
defeating, that the preconditions of their accomplishment are such as
to
require a qualification in our attachment to them. The aim of practical
analysis, as Freud eventually announced it in his
New Introductory
L ectures,
was not simply to transform what was hitherto brute psychic
energy into civilizing power (".. . so to extend the ego's organization
that it can take over new portions of the id"), but simultaneously to
relax our commitment to the need for this transformation ("to strength–
en the ego, to make it more independent of the super-ego, to widen its
field of vision ...."). This return of Freud upon himself, this reawaken-
